This version includes the original title music/screen, plus a basic menu for choosing the game mode (practice, easy/medium/hard AI, two player). This build probably requires Lion, but I haven’t got any older OSX installs to test on.

It also includes an improved AI that I wrote months ago but didn’t get around to blogging about. The old AI tried to figure out where best to place an egg pair based on the number of connections that a given placement would make. It tried every column for both horizontal orientations, and each outcome was penalised for increasing the overall height of the playfield. The new AI creates copies of the game grid and runs simulations of all possible moves that it can make. It takes into account sequential chains, chain lengths, garbage egg removals and overall grid height. Once all of the simulations has run it chooses the move that produces the highest score.

The new AI doesn’t consider the pair of next eggs that are due to fall, but as I don’t recall ever beating it on its hardest setting (with the standard 4 egg colours) that isn’t really a concern. The main motivation for rewriting it was to improve its performance with 5 and 6 egg colours (which aren’t exposed in the menu system yet). If I remember correctly, the new version beats the old one most of the time.